Why Being Good, Fast and Cheap Is the Most Radical Thing a Brand Can Do

Never pretend people owe you their attention

Most ads are invisible. Not because people hate advertising but because too many brands seem to have forgotten how to earn attention. Consumers—exhausted from decades of loud, manipulative and irrelevant messages–are tuning out. They’re blocking ads out of self-defense. The harder brands push with bigger budgets, louder messages and more placements, the faster audiences disappear.

The brands breaking through aren’t outspending the noise. They’re refusing to make it.

They work lean. They move fast. They make things that feel less like advertising and more like something worth a few seconds of a consumer’s day. e.l.f. Cosmetics built a cult following through TikTok-native content that looked and felt like it came from fans. Duolingo turned a push notification app into a comedy brand by letting its social team operate more like sketch writers than brand managers. Buffalo Wild Wings owned March Madness overtime without a celebrity or a soundtrack—just the right idea at the right moment.

None of these required blockbuster budgets. All required courage, speed and the conviction to let the idea ride once it was good.

I learned this when I was 14. Not in a boardroom or a brief—in a driveway, with a beat-up camera and a BMX crew that had more nerve than resources. We made home-dubbed VHS tapes and mailed them to our few-but-loyal fans because we had something to say and couldn’t wait for permission to say it. The work wasn’t polished. It was alive. That’s the energy I’ve been chasing ever since—breaking into conversations without being thrown out.

The playbook hasn’t changed. The stakes have.

Most ads today still stink. They’re too loud, too desperate and too convinced that volume equals impact. They interrupt everything and register nothing. Brands keep spending more to reach people who have never been more determined not to be reached.

How do you put ideas into the ether and let them permeate, thrive and survive? By being good, fast and cheap.

Don’t wait for the perfect brief. Some of the most talked-about brand moments have been cheap to make and fast to execute. They worked because they were true—true to the brand and true to the moment. Truth doesn’t need a high-production budget. It needs nerve.

Make 10 small bets instead of one enormous one. And get comfortable with work that feels a little rough, because rough is often what feels real.

Working this way is more than a creative choice. It’s a commitment to unlearning everything that made your brand safe and invisible. Start here:

Never again make work people politely tolerate. If it wouldn’t stop someone mid-scroll, it isn’t finished.

Never worship best practices like they’re creative scripture. Best practices describe what worked yesterday for someone else.

Never again sand the edges off ideas until they slide past audiences unseen. The weird part is usually the part worth keeping.

Never again let fear dress up as logic. “We don’t have data on that” is not a creative strategy.

Never again treat advertising like a burden. It’s an invitation to sneak into someone’s day and leave something worth remembering.

Never again pretend people owe you their attention. They don’t. They never did. Earn it or go home.

Creativity is not a department. It’s the bloodstream of the whole company. It belongs to anyone brave enough to imagine something better than what exists. And right now, the brands acting on that belief are the ones earning the attention everyone else is buying.

So how do you lead the people doing this work?

Protect their spark. Ideas show up naked, half-formed and embarrassing. Your job isn’t to judge the spark. It’s to guard it until it grows teeth.

Create speed, not stress. Fast teams aren’t frantic teams—they’re focused ones. Speed through panic leads to burnout. Speed through focus leads to breakthroughs. The brands winning today have learned to compress the distance between idea and execution not by cutting corners, but by cutting bureaucracy.

Praise courage, not perfection. courage compounds. When people see risk rewarded, they take more risks. When they see it punished, they stop—and your brand quietly becomes indistinguishable from competitors playing it safe.

Stay curious. The best leaders aren’t the ones who know the most, they’re the ones who notice the most. Curiosity keeps you relevant. Keeps the work alive. When leaders stop being curious, teams stop being brave.

The brands that matter 10 years from now aren’t planning their way there. They’re creating their way there—good, fast and cheap. Just like we did when we were 14 and hungry enough to figure it out with whatever we had.